I've stopped caring long before 50 million.

And in the meantime... Firefox is losing its hardly gained marketshare!

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/12/HNfirefoxloses_1.html

It's better to have "hardly gained" marketshare than "hardly earned".

Or to have significant marketshare at all :)

If the upcoming Firefox 1.5 is going to be as stable as it is now on, it will keep losing its share.

I can't stress how important it is not to have a crashing browser.

Forget Infoworld. I see no real cause for the reported drop. It can't be the MSIE 7 Beta.

Here comes webhits.de, which gives Mozilla a steady growth to 18.2% in Germany:

http://www.webhits.de/deutsch/index.shtml?webstats.html

Xiti Monitor of France also records growth in Europe:

http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement10.asp

I hope that Mozillas market share goes up even higher when Firefox 1.5 hits the street.

PS: I submitted this information along with the infoworld.com piece to Mozillazine this morning.

All I can see in my surrounding is that a lot of users are running towards Opera.
Why? I think they have had a lot of patience with fb/fx...but now it´s over.
They resign, tired of memory leaks, disappearing bookmarks, fiddling with plugins and profile hassling and so on.
I myself expect a great breakdown cause of losing patience with the baby Firefox...a lot of people are on the jump...and only wait for the next opportunity to leave fx.

So Fx 1.5 has to be really good...for heaven´s sake.

This is great and should be celebrated. There's little reason for some of the negative comments. The only comment of Asa's I disagree with sadly, is where he says at SFx, SFx is directly responsible for this figure, well thats just not true, Firefox has earnt most of those on it's own back, in numerous of ways, but anyway, this is good news guys come on.

One report shows Firefox losing share, and to be honest, it's not all that accurate, there's no reason for loss, and downloads have gone up, it is seriously unlikely its accurate. Even their next report will show this I bet you.

Heh; your clearly having problems with Firefox not being stable. This is uncommon, your problems aren't everyones. Just as most IE users turn to forums and such for help to fix them, I suggest you do the same, the Mozillazine Firefox Support forums are very good. My guesses are anti virus and/or firewall issues/configuration, extension incompatibilities, spyware, or all of the above. Clean you system out with Ad-Aware, check you Firewall and Anti virus, then try a new profile in Firefox. Then if you still have problems, and have followed other support advice, then you can moan - but still not on a page RE: celebrating Firefox usage.

100 million here we come, then we need to put emphasis on usage, agreed, imo, as thats higher and more truly representative!!

Those Stats are trivial and very inaccurate. Why?

1. There is ways one can fool sites by changing the U.A.(User Agent)
2. A lot people block cookies, tracking stats, and cache or whatever. or just use a text based browser Which probably wouldn't count. :D
3. The website is purely biased e.g.; Microsoft.com
4. Some are only counting per site(per visit, or per unique id) what about proxys?
5. One site can't possibly be 100% accurate.

Like Asa proclaimed; "Stats are stats"

anyways. I'd say over 80,000,000 by now, theres quite alot of users of firefox, but theres more d/l's.. Cheers to Firefox btw

Nice post, thanks for putting some of the many points as to why this stat is inaccurate clearly. As with anything, don't believe it straight away.

Without a doubt however, there more users than downloads. There is believed to be a billion people with internet access, and Firefox has give or take the odd point, 10% market share (100 million). Many believe it's actually gone way above this now too. Why, because the download count, is just that, it counts downloads from there and perhaps the odd mirror.

First of all there are many many other not counted mirrors out there. Second of all, some of those downloaded, were used to install on 10-1000 machines, via CD's (eg Firemonger), portable devices (eg USB storage) and deployed over networks in various ways (businesses, colleges etc).

"Like Asa proclaimed; "Stats are stats""

.. and never forget that download counts are "just stats" with their own inaccuracies too. ;-)

Telstra wrote: "And in the meantime... Firefox is losing its hardly gained marketshare!"

I'm not exactly sure what to make of the Net Applications data; I suspect that it has to do with the school year (students, especially university students as per my experience, being early adopters and prolific web users ;). If that is the case, we should see fairly flat data from July to August and then a spike back up in September...

As for 'hardly gained', is that what you would have said about IE about nine years ago?

Heh wrote: "If the upcoming Firefox 1.5 is going to be as stable as it is now on, it will keep losing its share. I can't stress how important it is not to have a crashing browser.

Um... My experience has been that FF only rarely crashes, even with lots of (e.g. several dozen) tabs open. If anything, I would suspect your OS of bad behavior ;) If you use Windows, be sure to check for ad/spy/malware, worms and viruses before complaining that its FF causing your problems ;-)

I've never once had firefox crash, or leak so called memory. And I've been using it since 0.8!

What ever, stats or no stats, losing or gaining marketshare, crashes or not, this is quite an achievement. Well done Mozilla team!

Note: Hey, I don't even use Mozilla Firefox but SeaMonkey in combination with MultiZilla ;)

Kris wrote ref, Asa’s comment on SFx - “SFx is directly responsible for this figure,…”

I interpreted Asa’s comment to mean that from the initial hundreds and thousands the millions grew, I think that if it were not for the SFx buzz to begging with the growth would not have occurred for adoption would have been more limited to the usual higher tech, Slash Dotters and Mozillazine crowds :)

Open comment to everyone here; At the end of the day, don’t knock yourself out with concerns about accuracy, great new is just great news and surely not worthy quantifying!

Listen up, 80 million and counting! Nothing, I repeat nothing has even come remotely close to that level for success for ten years, so I say that’s awesome Mozilla were proud of you!

Where are you guys counting the downloads from?

I was going to ask the same thing as the guest...I've been wondering that since I started using Firefox--80 kajillion from what point? Will it ever be reset-like say when 1.5 is released?

Interesting. When Opera users claim web stats are grossly inaccurate, we are laballed liars, or apologists. However, when Firefox's market share slips, even slightly - well, the stats must be wrong! There is simply no other explanation!